Western Analysts Seek Evidence : China’s Propaganda Tries to Sow Death Toll Doubts

days after China’s “night of the black cloud”--when Chinese soldiers opened fire on thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing--Western military analysts combed the streets, sidewalk cracks and cement crevices near Tian An Men Square and the scenes of other clashes in the city, searching for hard evidence of what had really happened.

They collected hundreds of spent machine-gun cartridges and flattened bullet heads. They scanned bullet-pocked walls and scorched patches of concrete where, according to some reports, the soldiers had stacked and burned scores of bodies. And, ever since, they have been analyzing the few bits of

physical evidence they have gleaned from a night that may have altered the course of the most populous nation on Earth.

Behind this macabre international post-mortem is a question that will affect whether China’s current leadership faces a long international isolation or gradual forgiveness: Just how high was the toll of human life on the night of June 3-4?

The international media have reported that the blood of the Chinese people flowed freely that night in central Beijing, that perhaps thousands died. The Chinese leadership says that just 200 soldiers and civilians were killed.

Almost predictably in a nation with one of the world’s most sophisticated security and propaganda machines, none of the analysts has been able to document initial Western reports that as many as 3,000 civilians were shot, beaten or crushed to death under tanks and armored personnel carriers that night.

Although many Western experts still contend that, based on their limited physical evidence, at least 1,000 civilians perished in the Chinese army’s crackdown on the pro-democracy forces, their findings have been all but buried by China’s high-tech propaganda campaign, which was intensified this week.

“We’re looking at a fantastic propaganda campaign that’s beginning to work--the seed of doubt has been sown,” said one of the Western military experts who has been collecting and analyzing the evidence. “Even in America, people are starting to say, ‘Gee, that’s right, we don’t have any proof’ ” of a huge death toll.

“The Chinese took some time to digest all this information--digesting and trying to find fault in Western news coverage. Obviously they found some gaps and holes in the coverage and are now exploiting them. And what they are doing now is quite sophisticated. They are using the Western coverage for their own aims.”

An example appeared in Thursday’s edition of the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily in a column headlined, “Criticizing Rumors in the Modern Times.”

Declaring that, at the peak of the pro-democracy demonstrations, “Tian An Men Square, awash with rumors, became a rotten flesh on the body of the People’s Republic,” the column included a lengthy and specific discussion of the Western media’s reporting on the death toll from the army’s advance into central Beijing.

Citing the reports from the three major U.S. television networks, the Associated Press, the British Broadcasting Corp., the British news agency Reuters and the French news agency Agence France-Presse, the column listed figures that varied from 500 dead to 2,000.

“In short, they (the numbers) were purely fictitious, and they (the media) cared not if their numbers came to blows with each other, or that, if they pushed them on the world, they would slander China,” the newspaper said.

Asked about reports published in the American press last week that backtracked radically from the original Western estimates of thousands of deaths and putting the toll at somewhere between 300 and 800, the source said, “Nobody has any absolute proof. But I talked to a lot of people, and I personally come up with an absolute, conservative minimum of 1,000. I’ve heard a mid-range number of 2,500 which I don’t find exaggerated at all. The truth probably lies somewhere between those numbers.”

Another Western diplomatic source also put the death toll at more than 2,000, but, when pressed, fell back on an often-quoted estimate of 2,600 that was announced--and later vehemently disowned--by the Chinese Red Cross.

But several of the Western analysts insisted that they are basing their estimates on more than the Red Cross report.

Using ballistics and other physical evidence gathered in the days after the army attack, they are attempting to build an empirical case that would establish what they call the “killing potential” of the soldiers that night, if not an actual death count.

Most of the spent shells recovered during their investigation are 7.62-millimeter, the standard ammunition used in the Chinese army’s AK-47 automatic rifles. But the bullets themselves are of special design, capable of piercing metal and causing maximum damage in the human body.

One Western military source here said analyses of the bullets fired by the army June 3-4 showed that they had hard metal cores encased in soft metal jackets. The jackets rip off the core when the bullet enters a body and shred all surrounding organs or flesh, he said. The core then tumbles through the body and exits with a velocity capable of hitting another person standing nearby in a crowd.

What is more, the source said, experts investigating the army crackdown that night also found many spent 14.5-millimeter shells, the ammunition used in the heavy machine guns mounted atop Chinese tanks. They found scores of pockmarks left by this caliber of ammunition at human chest level on the walls of buildings along Changan Avenue near Tian An Men Square.

“These (machine guns) are supposed to be used to pierce through armored personnel carriers,” the source said. “With one round in a crowd, you’re going to penetrate a lot of people.”

In the initial investigation, the source said, the only evidence that could support rumors of a huge human bonfire in the square after the army took it and sealed it to the public was the makeup of the 27th Army convoys that were dispatched to drive out the demonstrators.

Several expert sources said the lead vehicles were armored recovery vehicles, which are designed for use in clearing tanks damaged in battle but could have been used that night to bulldoze bodies, followed by armored personnel carriers, tanks and, finally, fuel trucks.

“There was no possible military use for fuel trucks that night,” one expert said, adding that the fuel could have been used to start the bonfire.

Three Western journalists who were taken on a press tour of Tian An Men earlier this week by a martial-law commander also noticed burn marks on the concrete. When they asked the officer what had happened, he said that the students had burned their tents and banners before the army led them away.

The commander cited as proof state-run television, which several times has shown the peaceful surrender of some of the last student holdouts around the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the square. But the footage aired has been the same each time, lasting just two minutes. During the press tour, the commander said it took his troops an hour to clear the square. Asked then why the other 58 minutes of footage has never been broadcast, the officer insisted that indeed it had been aired.

The analysts suggested explanations for the scarcity of eyewitnesses and non-government television footage of what happened in the square after the troops arrived. They noted that around 4 a.m. that night, when the troops fighting their way along Changan Avenue from east and west were nearing the square, the army doused all of the lights in the square and flooded it with tear gas. In the words of one Western military expert who was observing the operation that night, “You could not see more than a few feet away, and that alone cut down on eyewitnesses.

“Also, when people saw someone die, they immediately fled.”

The Western experts cited another example of the Chinese propaganda approach. The Chinese leadership has squeezed much publicity from describing repeatedly and in great detail how a soldier was mobbed, beaten, burned to death and disemboweled.

But the Western military sources say that version tells only half the story. A videotape of the incident, they say, begins with the soldier firing his AK-47 assault rifle into a crowd, killing a student, a woman and another bystander, before running out of ammunition. Only then, they say, was he overrun by the crowd of civilians who killed him.

“But the Chinese use (the tape) only from the point where the mob attacks,” one Western military source said. “They’re exploiting it to the point that even some people in the West, who, three weeks ago, were sure there was a massacre, now are saying, ‘Well, now I don’t know.’ ”

In the vacuum of information that has long characterized key events in China, one of the sources added, “It’s a war of semantics and narrow definitions coming out now”--few facts, piles of propaganda and an almost universal recognition that the rest of the world will probably never know how many really died.